I’m an author, journalist and one of the UK’s social media pioneers. Here I write about publishing, self-publishing and crowdfunding.
I am also the author of Argleton, a novelette about a mysterious town that appears on digital maps but doesn’t exist in reality. I self-published via Kickstarter and Amazon Kindle, and am negotiating my way through the publishing world and exploring new business models for entrepreneurial authors along the way.
As a freelance journalist, I have written about social media and technology for FirstPost.com, The Guardian, CIO Magazine and Computer Weekly.

The Truth About Social Media

The “how to use social media to sell millions of your books” post is a staple amongst self-publishing bloggers. Mostly they are laundry lists of Things You Should Be Doing, as if all anyone needs is a checklist of things to tick off.

Photo credit: The Next Web

But here’s the rub: Social media doesn’t work like that, and neither does book marketing. It’s not about how many tasks you can tick off your to do list but about nurturing your following and making sure they feel valued. It’s about finding a place for yourself online where you’re comfortable enough to want to stay and interact with people. It’s about creating community, relationships and loyalty.

So here’s a more realistic guide to social media, based on my own 11 years of blogging and nine years of working as a social media consultant.

1. Social media is a long gameI can’t count the number of clients I’ve had who wanted instant results on social media, but it really doesn’t work like that. It takes time to build a following on Twitter or Google Plus or your blog. Time and a lot of effort. To start with, it will feel as if you’re talking into the void, and you are, but you have to stick with it not for months but for years if you’re to realise the full benefit of social tools, so get your stubborn face on.

2. Being a writer doesn’t make you specialYou can’t rely on the mere fact of you being a writer (or anything else, for that matter) to attract followers and readers. I follow a lot of writers on Twitter, for example, who are much, much more experienced than I am in the publishing game, and many of them have few followers. So be realistic about your expectations and don’t be downhearted if the followers don’t pile on overnight.

The good news for those with relatively modest followings is that social networks like Twitter or Facebook aren’t just a single network but a network of networks. Rather than the hub and spoke model, where you’re the hub and your followers the spokes, social networks are like webs with each of your spokes being the hub of their own network. This means one interesting post from you can travel widely as your followers and your followers followers pass it on.

Indeed, there’s plenty of evidence that you don’t need to be a major node in the network to have a successful post that travels far. Frustratingly for marketeers, the idea that popular people act as ‘influencers’ is starting to crumble, but that’s great news for the rest of us as close friends and loyal fans are much more important.

3. Pick a place where you feel comfortableSome people love Twitter. Some people love Facebook. Some people love Pinterest or Google+ or Reddit. Yet when you read advice on social media, you’ll almost always see an admonishment to be on one particular platform or other. Frequently it’s Facebook we’re told to inhabit, because it has 1 billion monthly active users and must therefore be the place to be.

Again, this is not really how social media works. If you hate Facebook, you simply won’t want to use it. If you use it for organising your personal life, you might not want to use it for professional stuff. And if you don’t feel comfortable with a particular tool, it will show in your updates and, ultimately, it’s likely that you’ll just stop using it.

So pick social networks that you enjoy and feel comfortable with, because you’re going to be spending some considerable time there over the coming months and years. If there are lots of networks you feel happy with, narrow down your choices by looking at the demographic of the network and think about how that fits in with your readers.

4. Accept that you can’t be everywhereIt often feels that there’s pressure to be on every single social network out there, but that’s impossible. Don’t even try to run more than a blog and a couple of accounts elsewhere, otherwise you’ll spend all your time updating and no time engaging. (See also point 8 below.)

It’s true that there are tools that allow you to hook up accounts, so that, say, Twitter posts to Facebook. But the risk is that you end up broadcasting and not talking to people, and the whole point of social media is to be sociable, not to just bombard people with updates.

If you run a blog, do integrate your social media accounts with it so that visitors can immediately see where else you’re active. But don’t feel that you have to be everywhere: If you have one service that you love using, that’s worth more than a dozen half-hearted accounts on tools you don’t care about.

5. Converse, don’t broadcastThe key word in ‘social media’ is ‘social’, which means talking to people, getting into conversations with strangers, and not just broadcasting. When you first start on a new social network, it might take quite a bit of effort to strike up conversations, but they are worth it. It’s through chatting with people and getting to know them that you’ll expand your circles and gain new followers.

New followers mean potential new fans and, if they like your stuff, they’ll help spread the word about it for you. The burden of promotion will not rest solely on your shoulders once you have a dedicated fanbase, however small, but you won’t get that if you put people off by talking at them instead of to them.

The flip side of conversation, however, is that there will be people who act like idiots. You’re under no obligation to reply to them, or to pay any attention to them. Judicious use of the block functionality will help you keep your social spaces pleasant and free of trolls.

6. Don’t blow your own trumpet all the timeYour writing might be the most important thing in the world to you, but there is such a thing as overdoing it on social media. If you’re too self-absorbed and spend most of your time talking about yourself, your books and your writing, you’ll turn people off. You have to balance self-promotion with conversation and linking to interesting things and other people’s stuff.

This can be especially difficult if you’re in the middle of a promotional cycle, whether of a book or Kickstarter campaign, when you’ll feel a lot of pressure to sell, sell, sell. People will forgive lots of chatter about your project if they know it’s a phase, but they’ll be less likely to excuse ongoing self-indulgence. Indeed, it can be counterproductive as people start to blank you out, the same way they blank out adverts.

Ultimately, the way to get re-shared, re-tweeted and linked is to be interesting, and that rarely means incessantly talking about yourself.

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Comments

Suw, once again, you’ve hit the topic on the head. Excellent post. I have 30+ years of sales and marketing background and I firmly believe you’ve a better chance at selling books by making daily contributions to a woodworking forum than off Twitter. People buy books recommended by friends not strangers.

Well, in so far as actual tools go, it’s horses for courses. I love Twitter, I have nearly 5000 followers there, and I have met some awesome friends through it. I also belong to a very specialist forum, where the people there have helped with technical details of my books and are also very interested in what I do. So it isn’t that one particular type of network is right or wrong, it’s what is right for you and your readers.

Thank you for an excellent article, as always. Perhaps authors can consider this: it’s hard to be on many social sites at once. Juggling them takes away from your writing time. I find that selecting the few that work for you, developing your relationships with followers and building your brand will reap good rewards. Spreading oneself too thin across the plethora of available social sites is not a great idea. I focus on the sites I feel comfortable with and that work for me: Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, Linked-In, and of course linking those sites to a blog. One can also find blogs that follow your genre (mine is Kid Lit) and comment regularly or enter blog-hops. I found more people visited my blog and commented when I participated in good blog-hops.

You’re spot on about how hard it is to juggle lots of social sites at once, and how that eats into your time. Focus in social media is important as focus in writing! I will confess that since I started writing here, my own blog has been neglected a little bit, but hoping to fix that soon, once my client work calms down. However, most of the traffic to my blog comes via Twitter, so you everything becomes self-reinforcing.

Suw, thank you so much for this fantastic post. I manage a website called “Everyday Ambassador” on which we try to highlight individuals in the social-change arena who understand/demonstrate the principles you’ve outlined above. (Our goal is to cultivate stronger relationship-management skills for those born in the digital era, with the hope it improves the quality of offline service work conducted.) So while your immediate audience may be writers, your messages are relevant to many other spheres. We’ll be sharing your post on our social media, and I hope that it does start conversations, as you note. Thanks so much. http://everydayambassador.org/

Thank you! It is indeed applicable far beyond publishing, as the myths around social media are widespread. The problem is that most people interested in social media don’t want to hear that it takes time and effort and doesn’t return results immediately. :/

Suw, that is one superb article. I’ve committed a number of the mistakes you refer to, and I can tell you “patience” is the watchword through the whole process of building an author platform. James is right – consumers don’t buy nearly as many books as friends do. Very nicely done, and promptly blogged, tweeted, digged, booked, pinned, linked, googled, stumbled, and tumbled :)

What you’ve written is so true. Many writers join several social sites because they’ve been told it’s “the thing to do.” I belong to several myself, and try to keep up, but it’s a tough haul. There’s a learning curve for all of them, and although I’ve attended seminars, they don’t really give you a true understanding of finding your way around the social media block. I attended a hootsuite seminar, but as yet haven’t applied what seems an excellent management tool. I’ve heard that people pay for a regular “twitterer” on their behalf—there’s a whole science on the subject. I think it’s important to just plod on, whether with one, two, or just three engines, and not watch the soil to see when the first sprout breaks through, as it does in time. Write on…